Biography

After graduating from Scripps College in California and the Publishing Procedures Course at Radcliffe, Eliot moved to New York City, where she worked at several publishing houses, including Simon & Schuster and Doubleday, and at Time Inc.

She later moved to Massachusetts with her husband and two children to become public relations director and humanities teacher at the Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School and later at the Great Barrington Waldorf High School. Courses she has taught include: History Through Language, The Novel – Graham Greene, The Odyssey, Parzival, Romance Literature, Shakespeare, World Religions, and a wide variety of creative writing courses. She has also held adult seminars and workshops for aspiring and published writers on various aspects of being a writer, including technique, creativity, publishing, marketing, and promotion.

A world traveler, she lived for several years in Greece, Italy, Spain, and England. She spent a year with her family on a freighter traveling from Greece to Japan. Her travels have taken her to sacred sites around the world, including the caves of Ajanta and Ellora in India, Delphi in Greece, the great pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge and other sacred stone circles in the West Country of England, and many more places. She has even traveled north of the Arctic Circle on an expedition through Scandinavia, and she spent several months in Japan, visiting Zen gardens and temples.

Eliot’s talent and interests come naturally: She is the heir of a long line of distinguished writers and educators. She is the daughter of Alexander Eliot, former Art Editor of Time Magazine and the writer Jane Winslow Eliot. Her great-great-grandfather, Charles W. Eliot, was president of Harvard for fifty years and revamped the American college Liberal Arts curriculum. He was also famous for establishing the “five-foot shelf,” a still-utilized collection of essential books. Her great-great grandmother, Ada Davenport Kendall was a leading journalist who spent several months in prison for protesting in support of women’s suffrage. Another ancestor, John Eliot, translated the Bible into Algonquin in the seventeenth century. Her favorite fiction writer of all time is her grandmother, Ethel Cook Eliot, who wrote children’s books (The House Above the Trees, The Wind Boy), teenage mysteries, and adult novels (Ariel Dances, Green Doors).

Eliot taught English and worked as the Community Relations Director for the Honolulu Waldorf School in Hawai’i from 2005 to 2007. Currently she is writing and teaching in Western Massachusetts.